Thou­sands check power site

Two months since the launch of the Elec­tric­ity Au­thor­ity’s What’s My Num­ber cam­paign, which di­rects con­sumers to www.whatsmynum­ber.org.nz to find out how much they can save on their elec­tric­ity bills, about 360,000 New Zealan­ders, in­clud­ing Mata­mata res­i­dents, have vis­ited the web­site.

This rep­re­sents es­ti­mated po­ten­tial sav­ings for New Zealan­ders of more than $57 mil­lion an­nu­ally.

The What’s My Num­ber cam­paign, con­ducted by the au­thor­ity in part­ner­ship with the Min­istry of Con­sumer Af­fairs and Con­sumer NZ, aims to help New Zealan­ders make more in­formed choices about their elec­tric­ity sup­pli­ers.

Since the launch, the cam­paign has seen a 47 per cent in­crease in the num­ber of peo­ple switch­ing elec­tric­ity sup­pli­ers.

Peo­ple want­ing to ac­cess the es­ti­mated sav­ings can then link to Con­sumer NZ’s Pow­erswitch site www.pow­erswitch.org.nz to con­firm a new deal and ini­ti­ate the switch to a new sup­plier.

The cam­paign was prompted by the fact that con­sumers’ in­cli­na­tion to change elec­tric­ity sup­pli­ers was low – sur­veys showed only 5 per cent of eli­gi­ble New Zealan­ders were ac­tively look­ing at switch­ing elec­tric­ity sup­pli­ers but the re­search also in­di­cated that 50 per cent said they would switch if ap­proached with a bet­ter deal.

‘‘These re­sults show that since the launch, New Zealan­ders are con­tin­u­ing to take ad­van­tage of proac­tive sav­ings on their elec­tric­ity bill,’’ said au­thor­ity chief ex­ec­u­tive Carl Hansen.

‘‘As a di­rect re­sult of the cam­paign, we have seen sev­eral elec­tric­ity sup­pli­ers of­fer­ing con­sumers bet­ter deals and ser­vice, and in­creas­ing their ac­tiv­ity to re­cruit and re­tain cus­tomers. A pri­mary ob­jec­tive of the cam­paign was to in­crease com­pe­ti­tion in the mar­ket place so it is ex­cel­lent to see ev­i­dence of that.’’

For more in­for­ma­tion num­ber.org.nz

In­for­ma­tion on num­bers of switches by re­tailer is avail­able on re­quest.